Dead Simple XML and JSON Parsing in Ruby

Parsing large or complicated XML or JSON files is never fun, and just plain sucks. There are quite a few options for parsing XML or JSON in Ruby, such as REXML or Nokogiri for XML, and JSON in Ruby's Standard Library, none of which are very spectacular. I recently stumbled on the rubygem Crack, which is a combination of the JSON parser for Rails and the XML parser for Merb, combined and managed by GitHub user jnunemaker. This little gem will parse any XML or JSON, returning the result as a Ruby hash. This is much nicer and cleaner than the other options in my opinion (mainly XML), that return the result as an odd structure that is usually annoying to find your way through.